The getopt module is a parser for command line options whose API is
designed to be familiar to users of the C getopt() function. Users who
are unfamiliar with the C getopt() function or who would like to write
less code and get better help and error messages should consider using the
argparse module instead.

This module helps scripts to parse the command line arguments in sys.argv.
It supports the same conventions as the Unix getopt() function (including
the special meanings of arguments of the form ‘-‘ and ‘--‘). Long
options similar to those supported by GNU software may be used as well via an
optional third argument.

Parses command line options and parameter list. args is the argument list to
be parsed, without the leading reference to the running program. Typically, this
means sys.argv[1:]. shortopts is the string of option letters that the
script wants to recognize, with options that require an argument followed by a
colon (':'; i.e., the same format that Unix getopt() uses).

Note

Unlike GNU getopt(), after a non-option argument, all further
arguments are considered also non-options. This is similar to the way
non-GNU Unix systems work.

longopts, if specified, must be a list of strings with the names of the
long options which should be supported. The leading '--' characters
should not be included in the option name. Long options which require an
argument should be followed by an equal sign ('='). Optional arguments
are not supported. To accept only long options, shortopts should be an
empty string. Long options on the command line can be recognized so long as
they provide a prefix of the option name that matches exactly one of the
accepted options. For example, if longopts is ['foo','frob'], the
option --fo will match as --foo, but --f will
not match uniquely, so GetoptError will be raised.

The return value consists of two elements: the first is a list of (option,value) pairs; the second is the list of program arguments left after the
option list was stripped (this is a trailing slice of args). Each
option-and-value pair returned has the option as its first element, prefixed
with a hyphen for short options (e.g., '-x') or two hyphens for long
options (e.g., '--long-option'), and the option argument as its
second element, or an empty string if the option has no argument. The
options occur in the list in the same order in which they were found, thus
allowing multiple occurrences. Long and short options may be mixed.

This function works like getopt(), except that GNU style scanning mode is
used by default. This means that option and non-option arguments may be
intermixed. The getopt() function stops processing options as soon as a
non-option argument is encountered.

If the first character of the option string is '+', or if the environment
variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, then option processing stops as
soon as a non-option argument is encountered.

This is raised when an unrecognized option is found in the argument list or when
an option requiring an argument is given none. The argument to the exception is
a string indicating the cause of the error. For long options, an argument given
to an option which does not require one will also cause this exception to be
raised. The attributes msg and opt give the error message and
related option; if there is no specific option to which the exception relates,
opt is an empty string.